(M)otherlands and fatherlands: The rhetorics of migrancy and belonging in the landscapes of Salman Rushdie

Among postmodernist and postcolonialist critics, Salman Rushdie is arguably the most prominent novelist and proponent of migrancy and its associated ideals. Significantly, he is considered, in ascending order: anti-essentialist, anti-nativist, anti-nationalist. This perception of Rushdie as predominantly migrant in his politics is, however, limiting. It does not permit his problematization of migrancy, which enables his critiques of globalization and transnational identity, to be foregrounded. In order to reveal Rushdie's more ambivalent perspective on migrancy, this dissertation considers the narratological concept of the "implied author" to amplify the organic voice arising from Rushdie's texts, which provides a counterpoint to the more conspicuous, dominant voice of Rushdie's narrator(s) supported by the author's industry-driven performance as "Rushdie." This dissertation, analyzing visual text and borrowing perspectives of landscape architecture, also focuses on Rushdie's depictions of natural and built landscapes magnifying the rhetoric of his implied author(s) and functioning as countercolonial strategies that reveal Rushdie's (unexpected) commitments to politically significant nativistic attachments to home, homeland and even nation while critiquing rigid conceptualizations of nationalism.